ATDTDA (7): Out as far as Reef could see, 209-210

[Paul Mackin]

On May 6, 2007, at 1:17 PM, Monte Davis wrote:

> > I don't think Madsen is suggesting the Western "sprang
> > full-blown from Wister's brow"...
>
> I have no objection to -- I endorse -- Madsen's "suggestion" that  
> as the 20th century began, *some* Westerns began to strike a new  
> note: they became historically minded and self-conscious enough to  
> show
>
> (1) awareness that the "classic Wild West" had ended, and had been  
> a very brief, fast-moving window from the Civil War to the 1890s...  
> and
>
> (2) awareness that stories about that far-from-typical fed some  
> deep American self-image needs even as we urbanized and  
> industrialized faster than ever.
>
> Obviously, those Westerns are the ones that provide the best fodder  
> for socioculturohistorical analysis, which is what Madsen's up to.  
> But they were also a small subset of, and not very typical of, the  
> Westerns that were regular fare for tens of millions of people for  
> four generations -- in the pulps from dime novels through the  
> Kenosha Kid, in a thousand forgotten movies and Gunsmoke and  
> Bonanza episodes, and in writers like Louis l'Amour (whose sales  
> figures are probably 100x those of Owen Wister).


speaking of "The Kenosha Kid" (whose locale incidentally is the  
Denver area) its author Forbes Parkhill in addition to being a writer  
of hundreds of pulp westerns was also a serious historian of the  
Rocky Mountain part of the wild west of the early 20th century but  
seems to have kept kept these two parts  of his career separate.  And  
there's nothing the least bit elegiac or philosophical about the KK.  
story.  (Pynchon's maybe but not Parkhill's)

Don't know if I ever mentioned it but Parkhill's non-fiction book  
"The Wildest of the West" covers some of the same Denver dens of  
iniquity as Pynchon does.


> I know what Madsen *means.* Unfortunately, what she *writes* -- "[t] 
> he Western is a product of the twentieth century -- the first  
> Western was Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902)" -- is... uh...  
> factually challenged unless given the benefit of your kindly  
> reinterpretation. And while I admired some things about the book as  
> a whole, I thought that chapter exemplified an all-too-common  
> intellectual failing: "I have no personal engagement with  
> phenomenon X, but one aspect of it supports my larger thesis, so  
> I'll treat that aspect as the essential and characteristic X."
>

what about the second half of her sentence

" . . . -and this century's desire to
construct for itself a noble if doomed
past"

whose 'desire' is she talking about?

is desire another word for demand (as in supply and demand)--that of  
the millions of poor joe blows who brought, read, and vicariously  
lived these exciting stories of bygone days as a way of relieving  
boredom and feeling good.

  without  this source of  "desire" the magazine publishers and movie  
producers couldn't have made all that dough.

she also may be  referring to  desire on the part of some ministry of  
propoganda  to construct the American Character is some way good for  
Them--she's a Pynchonian after all.

Fun with American culture studies






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